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>> 95 3 Hutto: Staging Transnational Justice Claims in the Time of Coloniality The genesis of a system of works or practices generated by the same habitus . . . cannot be described either as the autonomous development of a unique and always self-identical essence, or as a continuous creation of novelty, because it arises from the necessary yet unpredictable confrontation between the habitus and an event that can exercise a pertinent incitement on the habitus only if the latter snatches it from the contingency of the accidental and constitutes it as a problem by applying to it the very principles of its solution; and also because the habitus, like every “art of inventing,” is what makes it possible to produce an infinite number of practices that are relatively unpredictable . . . but also limited in their diversity. —Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (1990, 55) In the aftermath of the pro-immigration reform rallies of 2006, we witnessed an array of measures taken by city, state, and federal officials aimed at curtailing the immigration problem. The Sensenbrenner Act, which further criminalized behavior associated with undocumented labor, remained in the Republican agenda, and versions of it were voted on until late in 2006, when it was finally defeated. The habitus, which Bourdieu defines as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” that “function as structuring structures,” was “inventing” new political ways of reconstituting difference (1990, 53). Other successful legal provisions invented by the habitus allowed for workplace raids, the building of fences along the U.S.-Mexico border, and the indefinite detention of undocumented immigrants in centers that have been locations for legal exceptions and that exist beyond the reach of citizen or human rights. So, if up to this point I have been critical of law and the nation-state as the sole arbiter of justice, that does not mean that I wish to be in the absence of law, because to be in 96 > 97 xenophobic views about immigrants, in particular migrants from Latin America. To the credit of American society and as a testament to the potential ethical benefits of state liberalism, much of the legal community has opposed the federal government’s use of immigration law and the clear overriding of human rights law in the case of Hutto and the many other detention centers that have sprouted up around the nation to detain undocumented immigrants. Regarding Hutto, the ACLU and the University of Texas School of Law sued the government in 2007 and won a settlement on August 27 of the same year that included the ability to monitor the facilities. Just as important, the results of the lawsuit mandated the release of twenty-six of the children. But others remained. The practice itself was not ruled illegal. The legal and political communities that controlled the state and federal congresses remained complicit. On August 11, 2009, the new executive branch under President Barack Obama forced the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the government agency now in charge of safeguarding immigration law, to change detention practices . The DHS has since promised to close Hutto, but this has not yet happened at the time of this writing. Even in the wake of these positive developments, it is worth asking questions of justice, law, and media. Let us not forget that as President Obama ends the practice of jailing children, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants will remain in detention centers without recourse to some of the most basic legal rights. Outside the purview of citizen law, outside the reach of human rights jurisdiction , they are desubjectified, living in spaces of exception. This chapter analyzes the case of Hutto in terms of the historical, legal, and media traditions that constituted it. It argues that the root of this state of exception is the heavily ideological link between justice and citizenship, a link unlikely to be challenged by the hegemonic public sphere and the media field. A second argument is that successful analyses of media and citizenship and of media and Latinas/os cannot be performed without a framework that, like coloniality, understands the nation form as furthering the traditions of colonialism that gave it legal and economic power. The nation and its media are political organizations and in times of crises will revert to staunch polis-centrism. A state of exception is partly the result of mediated discourse, and its existence is dependent on the ability of the nation to narrowly define security, prosperity, and danger. Media systems join political and legal cultures to reproduce...

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